The Extinction of Menai. Chuma Nwokolo
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The Extinction of Menai
Modern African Writing
from Ohio University Press
Laura Murphy and Ainehi Edoro, Series Editors
This series brings the best African writing to an international audience.
These groundbreaking novels, memoirs, and other literary works showcase the most talented writers of the African continent. The series also features works of significant historical and literary value translated into English for the first time. Moderately priced, the books chosen for the series are well crafted, original, and ideally suited for African studies classes, world literature classes, or any reader looking for compelling voices of diverse African perspectives.
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The Extinction of Menai
Chuma Nwokolo
ISBN: 978-0-8214-2298-4
CHUMA NWOKOLO
The Extinction of Menai
A NOVEL
Ohio University Press
Athens
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2018 by Chuma Nwokolo
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nwokolo, Chuma, author.
Title: The extinction of Menai : a novel / Chuma Nwokolo.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, [2018] | Series: Modern African writing series
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053684| ISBN 9780821422984 (softcover) | ISBN 9780821446201 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Nigeria—Fiction. | Nigerian fiction (English) | BISAC: FICTION / General. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / African.
Classification: LCC PR9387.9.N947 E93 2018 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053684
Article 10.1
Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights
All language communities have equal rights.
Prologue
Notes from the National Historian
Nigeria Archives, Abuja
6th March, 1990
Today, six Menai children died from the effects of the 1980 Trevi inoculations in Kreektown. A half-naked procession of a few hundred men and women carried their dead twenty kilometres to the Sontik State capital in Ubesia. Police trucks arrived to keep order, pouring out dozens of armed men, but the topless mourners were tragic, not threatening, and they flowed past checkpoint after checkpoint, chanting Menai dirges, provoking sympathy from policemen and an unprecedented empathy from the public, so that by the time the six bodies were laid out by the gates of the Governor’s office in Ubesia, the numbers of topless mourners had swollen into the tens of thousands. . . .
No mass hysteria of this nature had ever been reported in Nigeria before, or since.
22nd April, 1990
An attempted coup led by Major Gideon Orkar failed to unseat the government of General Ibrahim Babangida, which had been in power since 1985. It was the bloodiest coup attempt in Nigerian history. Many of the plotters were from Sontik State in the Niger Delta region of the country, and the coup had been inspired by the feeling of exploitation of the region’s minority ethnic nations. After the failed coup there was increasing talk of secession in Sontik State.
17th May, 1990
Denying any connection with the coup of April 1990 or the secession agitations, the government established several commissions and enquiries to attend to minority issues, including the Petroleum Communities Development Fund (PCDF), the Department of Research and Cultural Documentation (DRCD), and a certain Psychiatric Enquiry by Dr. Ehi Fowaka. . . .
* * *
Extracts from the 1990 Interim Psychiatric Evaluation of the Menai People